Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Kelly, I agree with Thomas that Local SEO, Content Development and Social Media activity, surrounding your local geography, are the best tools to consider for achieving your goals of increasing your visibility for local long tail traffic. Thomas has made some good suggestions here, and I will add something more specific. I have seen a few sites, some of them not very beautifully designed, that offer 'what's it like to live here' user generated content. I've had to look at this when writing about areas in which I don't live. You have an advantage here in writing about your own home town, it would seem. What if you wrote a good article about each of the neighborhoods in your local city/cities and then invited users to expand on the article with their take on what it's like to live there? There could be subtopics, too, like what are the schools like here, what are the restaurants like here, what are the shops like here, what's the government like here, parks, doctors, etc. Here's an example: http://www.city-data.com/forum/san-bernardino-riverside-counties/839376-whats-like-live-palm-springs.html That is more in the form of a forum, which you might consider, or you might do yours more like blog posts and then treat the user entries somewhat like reviews, marking them up with Schema. Don't know if this is the perfect fit for the things you want to rank for, but it is a UGC feature I've noticed that I think is really cool. If your site could become THE powerhouse site offering this type of content in your city, that could be pretty powerful. Hope this helps!